Wikileaks founder Julian Assange speaks to the media inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on June 14, 2013. / Anthony Devlin, AFP/Getty Images

by Michael Winter, USA TODAY

by Michael Winter, USA TODAY

A key WikiLeaks staff member in Iceland spent three months in 2011 spying for the FBI on the transparency group and its founder, Julian Assange, Wired reported Thursday.

Sigurdur Thordarson, who access to Assange and was an organizer, told Kevin Poulsen that the FBI paid him about $5,000 for his three months as an informant when he was 18 years old. He said that the FBI flew him out of Iceland for four debriefings, including one in Washington, D.C., and that he turned over eight hard drives full of WikiLeaks chat logs, video and other data.

He joined WikiLeaks in 2010 while in high school after the organization published bank documents that shed light on Iceland's financial collapse. Poulsen writes that after a "staff revolt" left the group short-handed, "Assange put Thordarson in charge of the WikiLeaks chat room, making Thordarson the first point of contact for new volunteers, journalists, potential sources, and outside groups clamoring to get in with WikiLeaks at the peak of its notoriety."

Thordarson began informing in August 2011, when he walked into the U.S. Embassy in ReykjavÃ­k, the capital of Iceland, with a photocopy of Assange's Australian passport.

Poulsen, a hacking legend who served prison time for his "black hat" exploits in the 1990s, writes that Thordarson "provides a rare window into the U.S. law enforcement investigation into WikiLeaks."

Thordarson's double-life illustrates the lengths to which the government was willing to go in its pursuit of Julian Assange, approaching WikiLeaks with the tactics honed during the FBI's work against organized crime and computer hacking - or, more darkly, the bureau's Hoover-era infiltration of civil rights groups.

Noting "a hurdle" in reporting on Thordarson, Poulsen writes that he "is prone to lying" but handed over e-mails and other documents that allegedly corroborate his claims:

He admits he has lied to me in the past. For this story, Thordarson backed his account by providing emails that appear to be between him and his FBI handlers, flight records for some of his travels, and an FBI receipt indicating that he gave them eight hard drives. The Icelandic Ministry of the Interior has previously confirmed that the FBI flew to Iceland to interview Thordarson. Thordarson also testified to much of this account in a session of the Icelandic Parliament, with [lawmaker Birgitta] Jonsdottir in attendance.

Finally, he has given me a substantial subset of the chat logs he says he passed to the FBI, amounting to about 2,000 pages, which, at the very least, proves that he kept logs and is willing to turn them over to a reporter disliked by Julian Assange.

The FBI declined to comment to Wired and USA TODAY.

For the past year, Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden for a sexual assault investigation or possibly to the United States because of WikiLeaks' notable disclosures of classified documents involving Iraq, Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy. Ecuador granted him political asylum last August.

Assange has been assisting NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who has also asked Ecuador for asylum but remains stranded in a Moscow airport after fleeing Hong Kong last week.